The afternoon is positively balmy. Nearly fifty degrees, with a cold disc of late January sun gleaming like a lozenge through high gray clouds. Warm as it is, there is something in the air - some damp chilliness - that warns of dropping temperatures, cold rain, ice and snow. Some lick of mountain air, some tongue of frost on the wind.
That gray light has a watery, painterly feel, especially so late in the afternoon, but there's still enough brightness that a certain creature's enormous sunglasses do not look wholly out of place, at least, not until she heads inside. Sera walked here. She's only been up for a couple of hours, max, and has somehow managed to get herself showered and dressed and out of the house while the sun's still in the sky. Accommpanied today by a tawny, brawny adolescent dog who probably should be on a leash, and isn't, but walks pretty companionably at her side right up to the 'dog parking' station outside the store. There Sera crouches down to Sid's level and unloops a lead from around her shoulders, attaches it to Sid's spiked black leather collar, and in turn hooks the lead to one of the 'dog parking' hooks before straightening and disappearing inside.
Doesn't bother taking off her sunglasses, Sera. Not even while she's fiddling with her phone and trying to claim and steer a cart and remember what the fuck she wanted and navigate, you know, the store. Strangers can be forgiven for assuming she's Somebody or maybe that she's Nobody. She has that feeling about her, and this combination of a strange and dirty glamour and a learned helplessness with ordinary things like Shopping for Groceries that reads, absolutely, like celebrity. Or: conversely, like a refusal of all the rules of ordinary life: turn on, tune in, drop out.
Nicholas HydeFor many people, this day is the extension of the weekend. Many of them did their shopping earlier in the day and are now at home, gathered around their kitchen tables or sitting in front of the TV. They've scented that shift in the air, the biting chill in the wind that means that they should go home and stay there until responsibility forces them to come out.
Hospital staff, on the other hand, are used to not getting the same days off as the rest of the world. People don't stop getting sick or stop dying on holidays. Nick, new and therefore the low man on the totem pole when it comes to requesting days off, was therefore at work today.
Wandering somewhere between the scones and cinnamon bread and the far healthier, more practical produce section, a head of dark curly hair and its owner can be seen flitting about. He is not harried, but like Serafine, seems like he might be just a little out of place in such a setting. Business casual dress and a dark green puffy jacket do very little to offset the somber set of his eyes and mouth, or the way in which the air around him seems a little more still, hushed even.
He picks up a bell pepper and examines it before dropping it into the basket hanging off his arm. A little far away at the moment, perhaps, detached from the physical - or, as his coworker would name it, "not being mindfully present."
[Wits + Awareness: Too spaced out to pick up on weird stuff?]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (4, 5, 8, 8, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 5 )
SerafínePer + Awareness
Dice: 7 d10 TN5 (2, 5, 6, 7, 7, 7, 9) ( success x 6 ) [Doubling Tens]
SerafíneOur Sera has managed to wrestle on of the little red carts out of their holding area and is piloting it with her forearms and one foot braced below on a crossbar, hop-steering while she texts one of her housemates to try to figure out where she can find the two or three things that were missing from her house when she woke up. She isn't used to waking up to a not-properly-stocked fridge, mind. She is used to waking up to whatever she wants whenever she wants it. More properly: the electric kettle put on by not-precisely-magick when she first stirs, and her Darjeeling already steeping when she stumbles down the stairs. I mean, sometimes she finds herself stiring her own eggs in a seasoned cast-iron pan with her hair a mess, her body still warm from sleep, her hangover a throbbing, solid presence in both temples, watching the whites string themselves to solidity over and over again but -
- well, neither here nor there. Today, though: no tea (or rather: not the kind she likes) and some note about a list and here she is and here someone else is, too. That assertion of resonance (Hallowed) so bright and immediate and new and she feels it, somehow, in the center of her spine, behind her eyes, beneath her breast.
That empty red cart becomes a mage-seeking missile of sorts. Not at all shy, Sera pilots it straight for Nicholas. Glances from the pepper in his basket to his profile, and back again.
"I have a whole fucking list and no idea where any of this shit is." She says and it's one of those moments where she couldn't possibly be speaking to him except she is: clearly one hundred percent speaking to him and also: the way she feels. None of this is a coincidence. "Wanna help me figure it out?"
SerafíneVisceral, enthralling, unbridled, incandescent: Sera feels like the beginning of a night you never want to see end, like the last catch of a breathone takes before plunging off a cliff, like the sensation of falling turning into flight, and the filament of flight bursting into flame. Or perhaps not bursting: but something else, brilliant, a constant, consumptive glow.
Something else, too: beneath or around or above or perhaps adorning that, not intrinsic to her but localising somewhere in or on or around her: this sensation of warmth, utter warmth, and flight that absolutely meshes with the bright, addiction, gut-wrenching sense of freedom she carries with her: sun-drenched, and soaring.
Nicholas HydeAll of Denver's resonances are new, to Nick. New enough that they could get lost in the background, drowned in the whirl of new sensations and sights and sounds, were he not feeling particularly attuned to them today. Work has left him reflective, as it so frequently does, each day an eight hour meditation on the nature of life and death. He experiences that katabasis each morning and afternoon with each of his clients, immerses himself in the sacred before emerging again.
He is silent glades, falling snow, the deep breath a person takes to steady themselves and take strength. His energy is not near so overwhelming as Serafine's, and yet there's something a little eerie about him all the same.
Nick's hand is just beginning to wander toward the onions when he glances up, his breath a sharp thing that within seconds he levels out. He senses this, something like elation, something like consumption, before he sees Serafine, and so he straightens and turns just in time for -
I have a whole fucking list and...
Nick's appraisal is quick, and obvious enough for it to be clear that he is not a man easily caught off guard, but perhaps is a man slow to respond. "Sure," he says, dropping the onion into his basket alongside the pepper. Then, wry, "I'm not sure how much help I'll be, but Trader Joe is the same anywhere you go, I guess." He extends a hand. "I'm Nick."
Serafíne"Hi Nick. I'm Serafíne," the creature responds, reaching out to take his hand in one of her own: right to right. Mind, she has to juggle the iPhone she is cradling in both palms to do so, but, " - you can call me Sera." This quick, curve of her mouth that is perhaps too responsive to be wry.
Her hands, well: they are limned in a close scrawl of tattoos. Script of some sort: names and dates perhaps, largely unreadable except for the flash of black ink here on her wrist, framing her palms, etched into the narrow space between her fingers. She's wearing a perfectly stereotypical leather jacket that has this very-well-worn quality to it over an unzipped black hoodie over, in turn a - something? bra, or bustier perhaps, or halter or crop-top that covers just enough for modesty and otherwise: skin skin skin. Denim cut-offs and fishnets and combat boots just as well-worn as the leather jacket complete the ensemble. An old bronze ring on her right index finger imparts that other sensation, which is with her but not of her, of drifting on a thermal, basking in the sun. Still: her fingers are objectively cold. The day is comparatively warm, sure. She's dressed ridiculously.
Doesn't seem inclined to stop talking, either.
"I was just gonna get some milk for my tea but then everyone started texting me other shit that I should get. Jicama and aracini balls and what the fuck are aracini balls and creme fraiche and some other shit. Cookie butter and dog treats and bacon." All of this she is half-reading from an exchange of texts on her phone, dark blue eyes darting to the screen, then back to him. Trader Joe is the same anywhere you go, I guess. A certain sort of animal shrewdness in her gaze, then, which feels: well, deliberate. A choice. Oh! "You're new in town," she almost, but not quite, crows.
She is always so pleased with herself when she figures things out.
Nicholas Hyde"Nice to meet you, Sera." Nick's handshake has the ease of someone meets new people routinely throughout the day; it is accompanied by eye contact and a faint smile, feels genuine but not practiced. A sort of impersonal warmth.
A few of his curls had corkscrewed down over his brow when he straightened earlier, and he shakes them away now, absorbing the list of demands Sera's roommates have apparently made. "You're popular today," he says, as she reads from her texts. He gestures toward the waiting produce, a brief cutting motion. "I'm getting things for dinner. You can come with me and maybe we can both figure out what the fuck aracini balls are."
His voice has the pleasant, steady timbre of someone who talks for a living. As he passes the jicama, he reaches down without looking, picks up one of the lumpy roots, and hands it to Sera. "I am," he says, mirroring that not-quite-exultant expression back at her. Nick is pleased when other people figure things out, or, perhaps more specifically, Nick is pleased when other people are pleased. "I just got here a few weeks ago."
He idles on, pausing only to pick up a bag of tomatoes. "My wife has been here a little longer than me. Have you met Pen?"
SerafíneNick tells Sera that she is popular today and:
"I'm a popular girl," she tosses back, and one absolutely has a sense of precisely that. Some ball lofted into the air because how the fuck could she do anything but toss that one back. This is accompanied by a lively and thoroughly self-aware smirk as she does her hop-wheeling-forearm steer of the cart alongside him through the produce section.
He finds the jicama almost without looking. She accepts it, rolls it around in her hands, all the trange nobby, fibrous bits of it, her sunglasses reflecting the lights in the space, her calloused, nimble fingers figuring it out. She is: surprised that it looks like that, isn't she? She thought it was white or something.
He asks if she's met his wife: Pen. And she hmms over that, sharp brows coming together over the dark glasses, you know, searching her brain and ?
??
is very much the expression tucked on her spare mouth, her sharp features. "I met," ??? "someone else new. A while ago. I don't - What does she look like?"
Nicholas Hyde"Red hair," Nick says, "and very Hermetic."
He glances down at her out of the corner of his eye as they round the corner and arrive at meat and dairy, where he points out the creme fraische. Stops to heft packages of chicken and chorizo into the basket. The smile at the corner of his mouth says that he is not Hermetic himself, and suspects this of Sera as well. What are the Traditions, without a little light ribbing?
That searching expression, he notes: magi that feel like Serafine, it's rare that they don't know everyone. Or, perhaps more appropriately, it's rare that everyone doesn't know of them. "I was just curious. Neither of us have really had a chance to get out much yet," he adds, his tone tinged with apology.
SerafíneThat still-puzzled threading of her expressive brows above the ridiculous sunglasses: which says that she is searching. Thinking. Thinking, which is something she finds much harder to do than feeling. Feeling is easy. She feels everything. It's what she was made for.
They keep going. She doesn't notice much as the produce gives way to meat-and-dairy. The lights and the smear of strangers and the gleam of a perfectly piled-up pyramid of oranges that is more-or-less begging to be either admired or sabotaged. For some reason, she picks up an apple and puts it in her cart. Puts it back then because there are tiny little red bananas instead and they are fucking adorable and who is that lady there giving shit away?
While Nick picks out a package of chicken breasts and some chorizo for dinner, Sera leaves her cart beside him wanders over to the free sample station. Takes like four or five of the little cups and wanders back over to her cart and puts three of the samples down in a row on the little shelf-seat beside her jicama, handing him the other two. Churros: still warm from wherever, and a dulce de leche sauce.
"I think Dan and I did meet her. For like two seconds? Does she feel like the Song of Roland or some shit like that? A Knight of the Round Table? It was this holiday fair, thing. I was just back - " a brief sense of: arrest, suspension that appears and is gone, quite as quickly as it arose. "I'd just gotten back in town. It was just in passing."
Nicholas HydeSera wanders, and Nick's head twists around to follow her to see where she's headed. Nick spends so much of his time in the Sleeper world that at times, when he interacts with other people like him, he has to stretch to recall that they don't behave like Sleepers. Sleepers don't have such disregard, such forgetfulness, for social mores and the unspoken rules most people follow; they don't move with that kind of freedom.
Nick, he's still bound by all that. For now.
"Thank you," he says, with evident pleasure as he takes up one of the little sample cups, the one with the bit of churro contained within. His eyes crinkle at the corners at the words Sera uses to describe Pen: Song of Roland, Knight of the Round Table. "That's her. I'll have to tell her you said that."
The way Sera's speech gives for a moment, as though it were flexing under some weight - Nick notices that. It's his job to notice. "Where are you coming back from?"
SerafíneNick, this stranger, notices that flex, that give, that sense of - something, not precisely cessation but something-passing - and Sera, listen, she notices him noticing. An artful lilt of her sharp chin, the gleam of her glasses turned on him, lifted up to the lights. Something about her mobile features made still: not in alarm or sorrow or grief or anything except: in that moment, awareness. A new consideration that plays strangely on her features.
"I was in Thailand. Then I was in LA. Then I was invisible," wry twist of her mouth, here, deliberate, absolutely. It is less about surrender, more about defiance. But, well. So is everything else about her. "technically I was invisible when I was in LA too, but. It was the weekend before Thanksgiving. Maybe you shouldn't tell her, though. I know some Hermetics. I mean if I told Hawksley you look like a Knight of the Round Table I'd never hear the end of it."
Nicholas HydeHawksley, Dan. Unfamiliar names, though this is to be expected when one is brand new in a city. Nick has to process this; it's not the first time he's moved across the country, but it is the first time that he's done so since Awakening. It's different from a new job, after all - most chantries don't hold Meet and Greets. No one gets to shadow until they know the job and are familiar with the city. The stakes are higher.
"You're right. I suppose I can spare you her reaction." Though really, Nick suspects some part of Pen would be amused or pleased. He is quiet for a moment while he chews on the churro from the paper cup. "You said you were invisible?"
His tone is casual enough - he's heard stranger, particularly from other magi. He makes eye contact often enough to indicate that he's not only asking to be polite, though: he wants to know.
SerafíneSera has plowed right through from one subject to the next because no, no thank you, she does not want -
- but he returns to it. This rhetorical trick, right, that reminds her of Pan: his solid, perhaps even stolid persistence. His confessor's patience. They have turned into the frozen-food aisle, the magickal land of every appetizer, ever. A tall woman with a clingy red-headed three-year old tosses a box of frozen happy-face potato puffs past her child, into the cart, then angles past them. The store is not crowded, except for - here and there - the employees restocking the shelves. But this woman Sera watches as she approaches, draws abreast, passes them. This woman, Sera seems to watch even after she has gone.
An expression of a kind of pained but thoughtful patience present on her face. This narrow frown that is more about searching for words, searching for precision with words than -
"To Them." So the creature explains, with a lift of her chin towards the woman, the stranger, who has by now disappeared around the corner of the aisle. "Paradox or something. I was ivnvisible to Sleepers. "Not even Dan could see me. I mean, a helluva lot of people I know wouldn't care or notice. Or would be like: thrilled that no one could interrupt them at the library.
"For me it really, really sucked."
Nicholas HydeIn the land of Appetizer, Nick hefts a box of mochi into his basket, which at this point is beginning to look rather full. He's a slender man, and he's beginning to shift the basket back and forth to either arm as his biceps weary.
Paradox. To someone at Nick's relative level of enlightenment, Paradox is often a distant bogeyman: he has experienced it, once or twice, but not like this. There are many things more experienced magi would be concerned about that Nick moves blithely past. Concern about discussing such things near Sleepers, for example.
For Sera, invisibility really sucked. "I can see that," Nick says, with a gentle furrowing of his brow and again, this second appraisal. "You seem like you like people. That must have been hard." He makes eye contact again, though not for so long a time as to make her feel awkward or exposed: such admissions are difficult enough. He is aware of that.
He looks over his shoulder at the woman who had passed. "They can see you now, though?"
Nicholas Hyde[last post]
In the land of Appetizer, Nick hefts a box of mochi into his basket, which at this point is beginning to look rather full. He's a slender man, and he's beginning to shift the basket back and forth to either arm as his biceps weary.
Paradox. To someone at Nick's relative level of enlightenment, Paradox is often a distant bogeyman: he has experienced it, once or twice, but not like this. There are many things more experienced magi would be concerned about that Nick moves blithely past. Concern about discussing such things near Sleepers, for example.
For Sera, invisibility really sucked. "I can see that," Nick says, with a gentle furrowing of his brow and again, this second appraisal. "You seem like you like people. That must have been hard." He makes eye contact again, though not for so long a time as to make her feel awkward or exposed: such admissions are difficult enough. He is aware of that.
He looks over his shoulder at the woman who had passed. "They can see you now, though?"
"Sure."
A neat, rather specific touch-back of a glance. The quiet edge of it, the dark glint of her glasses, the sweeping angle of her brow above the curve. She doesn't bother glancing at the shelves, or the things on the shelves, though she does seem to enjoy piloting that cart: both forearms braced on the handle, tattooed hands loose and forward, spare frame angled just so.
"I left town. It was too - " an arrest; her brow constricts in a very precise manner that seems to signify a strange and certain interiority. She likes words, Sera. Words on her tongue, in her head, on a page. Words well-deployed, but she cannot unearth a word that means all the things she wants it to mean so she hesitates, lingers, searches. " - creepy, and lonely, and painful, not in a way that clarifies. Leaving was better. It didn't hurt as much to be hidden from strangers. But being invisible to people I love, excised from their lives - "
As if to emphasize the point: her phone buzzes again. She glances at it. Smiles, private. Glances back: first his basket, then his profile.
"You can put your basket in my cart if you want. Where the fuck are the dog biscuits, do you think? Or the jerky. Sid likes beef jerky too."
Nicholas HydeNick, he is not so invested in appearing strong and masculine that he does not take her up on her invitation to put the basket in the cart. He sets it down, careful to nudge the things she has already set inside out of the way so he does not crush them. He digs the ball of his thumb into his forearm, working out a knot as he processes the things Sera has said.
Dog biscuits. "I think in this next row over," he says, taking a light hold on the corner of the cart and wheeling it into the next aisle as they reach the end of the frozen goods.
Invisibility. There are ways in which Nick understands this; he is a man with two lives, and never the twain shall meet. Yet what she describes is different. "Did it clarify, eventually?" he asks, because most painful experiences do, in some way. Though perhaps not yet - often, these things take time. Then, "Dan. Is he a Sleeper?"
SerafíneThey've missed the aracini balls. Somewhere in that long row of frozen foods. That's alright. The housemate who requested them was making a joke, texting a joke, which flew either under or over our Sera's radar even as it made him smile/smirk in the middle of a boring-retail-afternoon. He didn't actually believe Sera capable of doing so mundane a thing as shopping for perishables other than booze and/or edible marijuana infused chocolates.
Nick asks her if the pain of her isolation clarified, eventually. Sera hums, a quiet thread of consideration at the back of her throat, beneath her tongue. Then, shrugs, a fluid hitch of her narrow shoulders. "Sometimes." Which is: true. Though not in any way that is native to her soul. "Dan's a - " pause. Consideration, wry. " - sleepwalker, you could say.
"Your wife's folks have a more formal name for it. You're really good at asking questions, you know that?"
Oh, dog treats! Sera is almost inclined to buy one of each and every option. Good thing they aren't in a Wegman's or she'd never be able to carry them all home.
Nicholas HydeNick, too, reaches for a box of dog treats, almost as an afterthought. It hasn't occurred to him to remember the aracini balls. As much as Nick seems like he'd be the sort to have a good memory, he doesn't; there's a drifting, distracted sort of quality about him. He's a man who notices a lot, who becomes absorbed in whichever of those things happen to be the most interesting. Usually, that's the person he's with.
"A consor," he says, supplying the formal name. His people, too, make use of them. This is followed by a nod, slow, as he again processes her words, as though it has lent some clarity to him. Perhaps it has.
Sera tells him he's good at asking questions, and his response is amused, a sort of good natured crinkling of his nose and the corners of his eyes. "I'm a counselor. I would hope so," he says. Then, "I'm glad maybe everything is starting to make more sense. In as far as you can make it make sense, I suppose. What were you doing that caused the invisibility to happen?"
Nick is aware that Paradox is often the price (everything has one) of powerful magic. Sera, she feels powerful to him, like one of the mentor-types he'd run into more frequently in the older, more established chantries of the east coast.
Serafíne"Mmm." Nicholas supplies the Name: consor, and Sera affirms it: yes, consor, that sounds in the back of her throat. Except, "I don't really like that word, you know? Makes him seem less-than-me. Like a privileged servant or an organ-grinder's monkey."
And a sort of sobering of her expression: an awareness, as she hears her own thoughts aloud and finds that they fit, very precisely, into her experience of the world. Even if: that's almost precisely the way she treats Dan, isn't it, in the eyes of someone outside, looking in.
Then Nicholas tells her that he is a counselor, and he is glad that things are making sense again, and Sera's mouth twists itself into a private little smirk. Brief, that, so brief that it hardly surfaces before it smooths out into something else, with a brighter, lilting charm as Nick crinkles his nose. And tells her he's a counselor, and asks another question.
"I fucked up a seeking." So, no. It was not some Great Working, some alteration of the tracking of the spheres. "I mean, I think that's what it was. Maybe I fucked around with time, yeah, maybe it was this ghost-thing at Wat Umong, but I guess it was me. The last thing I remember is this tunnel beneath the Wat. Then I woke up in LAX and no one could see me and no one could see me and nothing worked. Not my phone, not my credit cards. Nothing."
Dog treats acquired, the cart starts moving again, almost of its own volition. No: wait. She is pushing. Nick may still be kinda steering: there is another endcap to circle, people to avoid. A whole aisle of wine-and-beer-and-snacks to navigate.
Huh. Sera's mouth seams, thoughtful, makes this supple moue. All those bottles. "Do you think they sell gin here?"
Nicholas HydeNick hesitates in replying to this, this idea of a privileged servant, because he loves Pen and he respects her Tradition, and yet - "I think that's because that is generally how the Order sees them. But I agree with you."
He misses that private smirk, evidently, since he doesn't remark on it or question it. Or perhaps he doesn't. He listens to her tell him she fucked up a Seeking. She reached, but not far enough, maybe fell - yes, he's heard of this happening to people. "I don't think they sell gin at grocery stores," he says, his tone generously implying the slightest bit of doubt, though he is very sure that they do not in fact. He is very sure at this point that Sera does not grocery shop on her own very often. "But I think I saw a liquor store on the other end of the strip."
There is some consideration of the rows and rows of bottles, before he reaches for a cabernet and sets it alongside the other items in the basket. Nick's sideways glance as Sera talks about her Seeking is curious, and he lingers on this in that quiet way he has been processing the other things she has told him. Perhaps he would like to know whether she has gone Seeking again, whether she was ultimately successful, but these are all very personal questions to ask.
Not that Sera seems as though she would mind, but then again. So, he switches: "Are you much involved in the chantry here?"
SerafíneSeveral things that earn Nick another considering glance from Sera. He agrees with her: about consors, the concept of privileged servants, perhaps about something as bright and sure as equality, self-determination, privilege and the parity of souls. God, the importance of choices and the ability to make them, maybe maybe maybe. They are walking down the beer-and-wine aisle in Trader Joe's, an employee in a Trader Joe's t-shirt and jeans with a box-cutter in a holster cutting around them and with no gin in the offing Sera seems disinclined to shop this aisle except: alcoholic ginger beer.
"Oooh." First she takes a picture of the squat little bottles, then she texts it to someone, then she puts two in her cart, and she does all of this without a hint of self-consciousness, though perhaps with a degree of self-awareness that expresses itself in the posture of her body or the twist of her mouth.
And Nick is right of course: Sera does not really go grocery shopping alone. She finds herself sometimes doing things in places without knowing why or how or what time of day or night it is, and that deliberate invitation to dis/orientation, to confusion, to an immediate and hallucinatory experience of the world, to feeling is part and parcel of her magick. Almost, perhaps, the whole of it.
Simple gifts.
"That's," hmmm. He earns, once again, the certainty of her regard. The gleam of her sunglasses beneath the store's lights, steady, steady, "complicated. I guess the answer is, not really, no, not lately - "
The answer feels like the invitation to another question, but there's something else forward in her expression, a sort of furrowing, and hey - there are other people around. Someone checking them out, Nick's basket separated from Sera's buggy and - Sera, sort of humming beneath her breath even as she turns back to him while the clerk zooms through her few purchases.
Nicholas Hyde[Awareness is important.]
Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 4, 4, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )
Nicholas HydeMaybe maybe maybe. Nick: he doesn't seem generally inclined to say just what he believes. Whatever principles he holds (as a Chakravanti, as a counselor) he holds tightly to his chest: these are things to be acted on, not spoken of. Words are wind.
There is again amusement that limns his angular features as Sera crouches down to photograph the ginger beer bottles. "All kinds of modern wonders in the store, aren't there?" he says. She is taking photos and sending them to a friend, and this gives him a moment to pull his phone from his pocket, to tap out a few words and send them.
Perhaps Pen will share his amusement at running into someone like them at Trader Joe's.
It does invite another question, and Nick was about to ask it, but the sudden thrum of energy (incandescent, unbrided, enthralling - the flame that draws moths, something deeper beneath that, more primal) stops his words in his throat. Sets him on edge even, for a moment, before he understands exactly what is being Worked in front of him, and extrapolates. "Too intrusive?" he asks, mildly.
SerafíneThat mind/life/entropy rote: coincidental. -1 (using unnecessary focus) -1 (time, the taking of) +1 (distracted, conversation)
Dice: 4 d10 TN4 (2, 7, 7, 8) ( success x 3 )
SerafíneHere they are at the check-out counter and no buggie between them. That has been claimed by a clerk in the standard casual uniform who zips through the groceries, understands without asking the separation of cart/basket, and would probably comment on the number of containers of dog treats except that Sera and Nick are clearly already involved in a conversation of their own, elliptical and allusory as it may be.
Too intrusive? Nick asks, and there is a scrim of an expression on Sera's sharp little mouth. Brief, grim, apologetic even. Oh, call it what it is: rue. Even, on some level, fucking sober.
And, "Naw." Says she, quietly. The glasses conceal some of the nuance of her expression. The delicacy as she looks down at the moving belt. Then up, away, past the display of spring bulbs, through the front windows to the street beyond. "It's more: I gotta be careful, especially with other people's shit, you know? Rumor is: all's not quiet on the western front."
Sera hands over an AmEx to pay for her things. Digs it out of the front pocket of her denim cut-offs.
Sobriety, that's it. It suits her ill.
Nicholas HydeThere's a smile that Nick directs toward the clerk, an expression that lies somewhere between friendliness and politeness and wanting to acknowledge someone who probably doesn't get acknowledged as a person very much. Then he turns his attention back to Sera, the rueful twisting of her mouth.
Nick adds a chocolate bar to the other items he is purchasing. "That's very considerate of you," he says, of Sera being careful of other people's shit. The way he says this is very neutral, difficult to tell whether he approves or disapproves or whether it's just a simple statement of fact. "I understand. It's better to be cautious."
He takes in this, that all's not quiet: perhaps he has heard this before, suspects on some level that there are Things Happening. He is married to a Hermetic, after all, the Tradition that fancies itself the leader of the others, the one that usually has its fingers in all the pies. "Are you keeping your head down then?"
He already has his debit card ready for the cashier, and swipes it once his items have been scanned. The chocolate bar, some sort of caramel toffee concoction, he hands to Sera. "Pen's suggestion."
SerafíneExtending!
Dice: 4 d10 TN5 (2, 6, 6, 8) ( success x 3 )
SerafíneThe clerk smiles back at Nick. The expression is neither cursory nor bright, but it is genuine, connected, physical: a sort of crest-and-retreat, back into studied neutrality.
--
Annd Sera, well, the way she stands - at the end of the check-out, a bag hefted out of the cart and held in hand, the picture windows behind her, framing her with the gray light of a late winter's afternoon, threading through her golden hair like (yes) a halo - looks, somehow, as if there were meant to be a chorus of the seraphim behind her, chanting holy holy holy, all burning swords and delirious zealotry and murdered children. Still that working-of-magick in the background but: he profers a chocolate bar and she accepts the chocolate bar and grins, quick and bright, the very simple promise of her pleasure.
--
Is she keeping her head down, then?
Oh, no. Sera shakes her head, no. They are heading outside. The doors swing open: as if by magick and then another set of doors ditto and the a bright blast of cold air. She isn't dressed for it. It doesn't seem to matter. There's a brawny, adolescent dog in the dog parking right outside the front doors who is all sudden-alert in a way that reads as playful not business and no one else in sight.
Sera shrugs, all negligent really. And replies, absolutely straightforward: "I don't think I could keep my head down, if I wanted to. Not really my style, you know? You're not a tech, are you?"
Nicholas HydeSera: for a moment, she burns, something far more intense than the manner of Nick's own Working in spite of the similarities that could initially be perceived. Nick, see, there's something much older, more primal (before Time was recorded, before anyone cared to) underlying his own working. Perhaps the clerk doesn't know what to make of the two of them, perhaps he feels it.
Either way, they are gone. Out the door, their bags in hand, with the chocolate bar exchanging hands. Nick, too, looks pleased that she has accepted.
He directs a smile toward the dog, something somehow warmer than the one he had given the clerk moments before. (People can be less inhibited with animals; there are fewer expectations, fewer nuances. Fewer complications.)
Sera asks if he is a Technocrat, and again, that amusement that crinkles his features could speak for him even before he has answered. "Me? No. I'm Chakravanti," he says, offering up his Tradition without reservation. Then: "Why, have they been a problem around here recently?" Ah, but that - Nick knows more than he is saying right now. It's not a lie, not exactly, but there is no need for him to ask the question. He has someone else's answer already, but he is looking for hers.
SerafíneSid, see, she senses shit. The warmth of that smile with which Nick favors her, for example. The beast is sporting a spiked black leather collar that seems thoroughly in keeping with Sera's sartorial flourishes and is tied to the wall with a leash that Sera promptly unhooks from both collar and wall. Sid crouches, playful and experimental, in a way that suggests that she is about to tear off down the street hoping to be chased: but no. She doesn't go far, romps away and then back and allows herself to be buffeted and caressed and adored by her mistress. Her friend. Sera chooses the Trader Joe's brand dog treat that most resembles a snausage and opens the box and offers one or maybe five to Sid without reservation.
There is more romping, and Nick answers Sera and Sera cants her head and he can feel her focus on him in that moment, a gleaming and reflective consideration eminant from those glasses, and then: that focus intensifies. A beat of a moment. Another: before she both nods and also lets go of that Working.
"I haven't had a problem with them." So Sera says, with a neat little shrug. She is already rising from her low crouch. Sid, freed of the lead, does not venture far. She understands complexities like traffic and stays close to Sera unless given the go ahead to let go and runrunrun. "But I've heard that they're changing again. Getting more militant. Hard to know what to believe, you know? You asked about the chantry?"
Nicholas HydeNick waits while Sera favors the dog with one (or five) dog treats, holding both of his bags in either hand. He hasn't drifted across the parking lot to head back to his car, parked at the hospital farther up the road. He is patient, and he is not particularly in a rush (though Pen, who may be hungry, may object.)
"That's what I've heard," Nick says, as Sera explains that they've gotten militant lately. That they're changing. He doesn't say what else he's heard, though it's likely it's something. As Sera said: it's hard to know what to believe.
"I just wondered," he says, in response to her question. "I haven't really been able to get up to the chantry yet myself. I heard there were fewer of us out in places like this than there are on the east coast. I thought maybe you were a ranking member, the deacon or something." Though he's aware, too, that rank and file is handled differently in many places, particularly out here where Hermetics don't carry so much weight.
SerafíneSid, see, she senses shit. The warmth of that smile with which Nick favors her, for example. The beast is sporting a spiked black leather collar that seems thoroughly in keeping with Sera's sartorial flourishes and is tied to the wall with a leash that Sera promptly unhooks from both collar and wall. Sid crouches, playful and experimental, in a way that suggests that she is about to tear off down the street hoping to be chased: but no. She doesn't go far, romps away and then back and allows herself to be buffeted and caressed and adored by her mistress. Her friend. Sera chooses the Trader Joe's brand dog treat that most resembles a snausage and opens the box and offers one or maybe five to Sid without reservation.
There is more romping, and Nick answers Sera and Sera cants her head and he can feel her focus on him in that moment, a gleaming and reflective consideration eminant from those glasses, and then: that focus intensifies. A beat of a moment. Another: before she both nods and also lets go of that Working.
"I haven't had a problem with them." So Sera says, with a neat little shrug. She is already rising from her low crouch. Sid, freed of the lead, does not venture far. She understands complexities like traffic and stays close to Sera unless given the go ahead to let go and runrunrun. "But I've heard that they're changing again. Getting more militant. Hard to know what to believe, you know? You asked about the chantry?"
SerafíneNick thinks that she might be the deacon or something. Our Sera is straightening now, and she is hefting up her own backs, and here the dog at her knees makes her seem even more feral, even more mythic, right? And there is nothing mannered about her. You'd think Artemis, seeing the girl-and-dog and something about her profile that belongs to seekers and hunters, but: no, not Artemis. Maenad.
Maenad, pleased in the parking lot that someone assumed she might be deacon-or-something of a chantry, and this is precisely how that expression crests: the crisp curve of her delight settling and sobering into something else, more present and complicated. "I was pretty involved," she explains, sobering, "not long after I got here a few years ago. Maybe a year ago, or so, Annie came back. Brought her coterie, Trinity. Annie owns the land.
"They keep it open, you know?
"But it really feels like the chantry belongs to them.
"And," an almost physical comma, here. "Deacon. I'm pretty flattered, but I don't think anyone here takes me that seriously. They're wrong, but - "
This slash of a smile, beneath her sunglasses. It is brimming with a distinctive and characteristic bravado.
"You and your wife should come to one of my parties. 719 Corona Street. Door's always open."
Nicholas HydeDeacon-or-something: this wasn't something Nick had said with the intent to be flattering. Though it was a fair assumption: the strength, the easy conversation, the apparent well connectedness; these are things he has come to expect in chantry leaders. Not always Deacons, but council members even.
Still, Sera smiles, and he is pleased to have elicited that reaction. He doesn't hide it. Nick, he's a somber man, for all of his occasional dry amusement and the good humor that frequently underlies his words, but he still basks in the positive emotion. There's little enough of it in the world. He picks up on the complexity of response, too: that she was pretty involved, but then someone came back, and now presumably she is less involved. That's the way it goes, sometimes.
"Thanks for the invitation. I'll extend it to Pen," he says, with a gracious dip of his head. He doesn't ask what kind of party, because he isn't sure and it might not be their kind of party necessarily - but the invitation is what's important. "Maybe we can have you over once there are fewer boxes in our house."
Because oh, right now it's a mess: cross country moves will do that.
SerafíneThere is, indeed, little enough positive emotion in the world writ large. And there is, also: a helluva lot of it wrapped in the spare frame of the Ecstatic with whom Nick is conversing. Positive emotio tempered by grief and suffering assuredly, suffering of a mode that imparts both clarity and opacity, but beneath it all: this impulse to passion, to pleasure, to love, to joy. Goddamnit, she can't even bloody help it.
In the midst of it all, though, the creature beside him practically basks in the nuance. Favors him with a side-slung look that would seem - perhaps - arch if he could see her eyes. Instead; a sense of awareness, of consideration, which lingers on his profile until it seems lush.
"Mmm." Her response to his not-quite-invitation. Which is to say, his invitation: just not-quite-now. "Gimme your number?"
His car is somewhere in the parking lot. between the dog and her state of not-quite-sobriety, it is easy to assume that she walked here and will be walking home.
Nicholas HydeThis is easy enough, providing her with his phone number: he hasn't bothered to switch it over yet, evidenced by the unfamiliar area code. Perhaps he won't; area codes mean little enough anymore, now that people move across the country and carry their phones with them, the number almost a unique identifier of where they're from, where they've been. He provides the number to Sera, spells his last name - "With a Y, not an I." He does not say "like Jekyll and," which he could, because that joke has been made and made often by people who were not him.
"Did you walk far?" This, a courtesy. Nick has been working for several years now and so the time of eternal pedestriandom is relatively behind him. Still, he remembers.
And Sera doesn't seem entirely sober, now that he thinks about it.
SerafíneThis is a familiar, physical, entirely non-magickal ritual. Nick offers up his phone number and his name, spells it even. Eschews the joke he could make about it, which is for the best after all. Sera might not get it. Her touchstones with the ordinary are equal parts routine and archaic, and her taste in literature runs to French symbolism and lyric poetry, not Victoriania, gothic or no.
And Sera: types in his name and number and then texts him back. ITS ME. Why not? There may even be a pic of Nick attached to that text.
They are parting ways, now, but: he inquires, out of courtesy, whether she walked far.
That slash of a smile again, beneath the frame of her sunglasses. "Not far. Anyway, Sid likes to walk.
"Have a lovely dinner, Nick. See you around."
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